Most organisations are failing to understand exactly what drives their business and financial performance despite placing great importance on business intelligence (BI), according to analyst Gartner.

Gartner research vice president Nigel Rayner will tell delegates at its Business Intelligence Summit at the end of the month, that traditional thinking around BI needs to change if businesses want to reap any benefits.

‘BI has been around a long time and people do get returns out of it, but it has been technology and infrastructure driven and is not addressing the needs of senior management,’ Rayner told Computing.

‘The traditional thinking around BI needs to change as businesses need to gain insight into the vast quantities of information they have,’ he said.

He says over the next two years, BI vendors will shift their focus to performance management (PM) applications to meet the needs of business users.

‘They have been good on the reporting side and the analyst-driven stuff. Most have an application development environment, but with the more sophisticated areas of performance management, it is too complicated to build. For example, finance demands lots of accounting rules which need packaged applications,’ said Rayner.

Rayner says companies must focus on embedding a PM strategy within its BI strategy.

‘BI competency centres where the business and IT people manage a BI and PM strategy together are key to success,’ he said.

Ensuring data quality and having a clear and consistent approach to defining common metrics is critical and there should be an alignment of business metrics and business objectives, says Rayner.

‘A lot of BI is driven by short-term needs of departments, but companies need to look at the objectives of the company and what senior management is trying to achieve and align BI and PM to corporate goals so there are a set of metrics that measure performance at all levels of the business in a consistent framework,’ he said.

BI Summit details at www.europe.gartner.com/bi

What do you think? Email us at: feedback@computing.co.uk